Customer Reviews for Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Gold Edition

Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Gold Edition
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Video Game Reviews of Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Gold Edition

Customer Review: Huge and engaging
Summary: 5 Stars

If there is any game that can be called epic in scope, meticulous in strategy, sprawling in duration, and stirring in impact, that game is certainly Civilization 4.

Civ 4 takes you from the dawn of civilization (4000 BC) to the near future (2050 AD). You lead your people through all of human history and experience about a dozen nebulously-defined eras, from fighting off lions on the prairie, to the development of roads and farms, to the formation of regular armies and iron tools, to your first sea exploration, to the development of the compass and astronomy which allows you to brave the open sea, to the age of gunpowder, to the age of sail: great wooden ships including privateers (secretly-funded pirates which can plunder rivals' trade routes without officially declaring war) and ships-of-the-line, to the development of the steam engine and industrial revolution: railroad on land and armored ships at sea, to the development of the submarine and infantry, to early air: new trade routes and a critical new dimension to military conflict, to the modern era with tanks and the machine gun, to current times with helicopters and stealth flight, to the near future including nuclear arms proliferation. Not that it goes in that strict order, since you can choose to study specific branches of research - naval and air research is a good idea on a sea map - before others, or even choose to completely neglect certain dead-end technologies like horse riding and possibly communism/fascism if you don't plan to go to war.

But fighting isn't all the game has to offer. In fact, unless you're a very skilled player, war is usually a bad idea because (unless you're able to force your enemy into total capitulation) it's one of the worst drains on your developing economy. Instead of building up huge armies, you can put your resources into maturing the arts, including music, theatre, literature, and philosophy, which will make your people happy and loyal, as well as spreading your culture throughout the world. Culture is so important that you can actually win the game by being loved enough by the people (or leaders) of the world. Nearby rival cities can even revolt and demand that their leaders allow them to join your culture! The development of religion is very important in the early game, comprising about half of the early research paths, but research into it is not a long-term waste as it's stepping point into the arts and the development of organized government, and sometimes determines which nations are considered cultural centers in the later game. Religious allegiances are powerful and religious and ideological wars can continue through the end game.

You also need to pay attention to the development of the sciences. From the development of writing (formal open-border agreements), the alphabet (technology trading), paper (map trading), and currency (gold trading), scientific research is by far the best long-term strategy for remaining relevant in the rapidly-changing Civ 4 world. It's difficult and critical to balance your allocation of research and production resources where they're needed now while making sacrifices in the short term for long term gains. One of the many brilliantly-chosen quotes associated with each technology is "It is not the strongest species that survives, but rather the one most responsive to change." You'll meet problems like transportation and food storage with solutions like the wheel and pottery. You meet problems like pollution and climate change with aqueducts, hospitals, recycling centers, and forest preserves. Every single era brings its own unique challenges which arise in the game's many different dimensions. If a peaceful religion spreads in your country, your citizens may refuse to work if you try to go to war (build jails or enact martial law!). If you defy the international community (Apostolic Palace / United Nations) then you may have to deal with riots. Floods (and enemy agents) can cause water poisoning which damages food supplies and puts some of your population out of work for awhile. These aren't isolated incidents that come up every once in awhile - you have to continuously monitor health, food supplies, metal supplies and other precious resources, the happiness of your population in each city, the robustness of your defenses, and the happiness of your people. If you build cities near jungles or flood plains you can be certain that you'll enounter disease and should carefully plan your infrastructure to make sure that you'll be able to deal with that problem repeatedly over the entire 6050 years of your reign.

Finance and gold supply is another critical component to a successful civilization. If your expenses exceed your income and your treasury is empty then production will sharply drop in poorer cities as people refuse to work without pay. A large cash reserve is extremely useful for rushing production in emergencies and pacifying powerful rivals. Domestic and foreign (land, sea, and air) trade routes bring in wealth (multiplied by customs house and bank infrastructure) you can lend your technical expertise to allies in the late game by being the first to develop international corporations, which you manage and consume specific resources to meet specific needs like scarce oil, scarce aluminum, scarce food, scarce common metals like copper and iron, and the insatiable desire of the people for jewels.

Strategically planning the layout of your country and building trade networks are also important to laying a healthy foundation for your nation. Different tiles grant your nearby cities different bonuses. Grasslands are good for growing food, and you probably want to build farms on them. The presence of hills with metals or coal grants a boost to production. You can pick which tiles you want each city to work, which allows you to specialize each city to some degree for what types of tiles are around it. As your city grows you'll be able to work more tiles, though you'll have to work more food tiles to support your workers. You can also put your population into specialists to put extra emphasis on production or research or wealth.

Despite the vast number of domestic problems you'll have to face, you'll have more headaches from your rivals. Each leader has their own unique personality. Some of them are just terrible leaders and make poor allies. Some rule their people with an iron fist (Mao...) which reduces their nation's productivity but makes it extraordinarily resistant to civil unrest and outside cultural forces. Some leaders just won't like you and your relationships will deteriorate despite your desperate bribes: if two leaders are both demanding that you cancel your deals with the other, there's nothing you can do to appease them. You'll constantly be monitoring your foreign advisor panels to keep track of your fickle rivals' ever-changing loyalties. Sometimes you can get away with shaping international opinion to unite against a single rival and avoid the almost inevitable collapse into two or three warring alliances. More often you can manipulate your allies into absorbing enemy rivals as vassal states by funding your allies' war efforts. International relations are determined by a bewildering array of factors including history (if they've known the other since the beginning of the game they tend to develop strong friendships or bloodthirsty rivalries), whether one nation is in the way of another's expansion, whether one nation has refused to help another by giving money or research, minor incidents like a spy being discovered or refused tribute, and difference in religion or civic choices. You can pick a state religion if you want, which is an extremely polarizing factor in terms of international relations, and you can pick one of five ways to organize your nation in four other categories: government, labor, civil rights, and economy, which also can cause international tension.

Short term goals make this exhausting game more accessible. The right choice for what you should be building next in each city often conflicts with constraints like the race to discover a technology before an opponent (Liberalism grants a free tech to the first discoverer and others grant a free Great Artist/Engineer/Scientist/Spy/General) or the race to build a world wonder. Wonders grant significant bonuses and tempt you to put your production on hold to scramble to finish it before a rival. If your rival finishes it first, you can't finish yours and the resources you put into its construction are liquidated into your treasury. Finishing the Apostolic Palace or United Nations first guarantees that your proposals are put to a vote. The Hanging Gardens grants a health a population bonus to all cities. Versailles increases government efficiency by reducing maintenance costs in nearby cities. There are hundreds of different - very expensive - options to consider and weigh against each other. A wonder that increases patriotic pride and decreases war protesters is a poor choice for a Pacifist nation.

The graphics are beautiful and the music classy and appropriate. Rivers and oceans are animated, the terrain is varied and realistic, and units and buildings each have their own unique models. It's all in 3D, which is pretty unpopular since it sends system requirements through the roof. It doesn't help that the AI is kind of slow when you're playing the late game on a Large or Huge map. You can zoom in and out. Lots of graphics options like health bars and assorted types of suggested tiles/paths/actions/selections that strobe at you. Everything you'd expect, whatever.

But Civilization 4 is not perfect. In fact, sometimes it verges on completely unplayable. My first complaint is with the domestic trade system. Your cities act like individual city-states, not like a country with a common government. You can't build a city in the desert or in a snowy tundra because it will starve: every city has to be completely self-sufficient because you can't transfer food from one city to another. Even in an advanced economy criscrossed with railroads, an airport network, public transportation, supermarkets, and biology research, a city not surrounded by grassland or plains will not be able to grow. Also resources are treated very poorly. I can understand only finding deer or gems or uranium in certain tiles, but you literally can only grow wheat, corn, rice, spices, wine, incense, bananas, pigs, sheep, cows, and horses (off the top of my head; I'm sure there's more) in the tiles where you find them in the wild! It is impossible to plant or breed vegetable and animal resources even in the near-future age: you can ONLY harvest corn where you find it growing wild. If you're unlucky enough to start in an area devoid of resources then you have to trade for what you need, which won't be easy since your economy will be crippled by poor production from the beginning. Also in domestic trade and most foreign trade, the trade routes just create wealth out of thin air and dump it into your treasury. You don't actually give anything away that you have surplus of, and you don't actually get anything back. Surpluses pile up unused and unusable while you struggle to make ends meet for resources that you lack. It would be nice if trade routes addressed this.

By far the most frustrating aspect of Civilization 4 is war. War costs a fortune - in production. You can have billions of gold and still struggle to raise an army, since rushing production and upgrading units is unrealistically expensive. If you put your efforts into building a strong early economy then a neighbor with an empty treasury and a ship full of swordsmen will utterly wipe you out. A little later in the game, especially on land maps, you may encounter a rival who's been doing nothing the entire game except cranking up an absurdly powerful war machine which he unleashes on his enemies and is literally unstoppable. I've had three or four musketeers in each city, which is a pretty good defense for an economic player like me, and seen a stack of no less than 30 knights appear on my border - on Noble difficulty. Of course, such a strategy is likely to end in ruin for the war monger, but with two or three rivals trying it it can actually succeed for one of them, and that's all it takes. To win the game you must play for long-term gains but the game is played one turn at a time and you could be conquered by a short-sighted rival who nevertheless is doing very well right now. More advanced units - perhaps realistically - have a really huge advantage. If you come across a comparable unit type one level above yours, it will take roughly two of your units to defeat it. More than one level it will take four to eight of your units. If you're playing defensively you can usually get away with using inferior units due to ridiculously high defensive bonuses. The problem is that while if you're a good player you may be evenly matched until about the end of the age of sail (in the fairest diffculty, Noble; anything below that is a joke), the world inevitably stratifies. Unless you actually start the game at the modern era you almost never see fair combat with airplanes. Either you're wielding vastly superior stealth technology over a helpless opponent and pulling the strings of the world economy, or you're incredulous at stumbling across a rival's unit that's 20 turns ahead of you and possibly somebody else's vassal state! The end of the game is a race to develop devastating technologies like nuclear weapons, stealth flight, and robotics, but at that point there's really nothing you can do to improve your position in the race. You usually can't expand and build more cities to boost your research and wars tend to be endless and unwinnable, like Nineteen Eighty-Four. If you get behind in military technology, then you're completely at the mercy of your more powerful rivals, which wouldn't be so bad if international politics were a little deeper.

Tech trading is deeply flawed. If you're on top you can push ahead in one line of research and your rivals will give up their secrets for your newest tech, allowing you to fill out the rest of your tech tree in other important areas. It's very easy to stay on top of the world's research. But if you run into that black hole of war and get sucked down off the top of the ladder it's nearly impossible to claw your way back to the top. Rivals will never sell late game techs for anything other than higher techs - even 3 billion gold doesn't impress them at all. So if you're on top you can trade your slightly higher techs for everything, but if you're in second then you can't trade for anything higher and you have to actually research every new tech you want. In other words, the one on top only has to research a single line of tech and can use the entire rest of the world's research to fill out the rest of his needs, while you have to research almost every single one of the new techs you want. You can't win the end game tech race unless you're already on top.

But how does someone else get on top if it's so hard? The problem is that you're one of like six to ten competing leaders. All sorts of misfortunes and conflicts will conspire to bring down the average leader. So somebody's bound to be on top but it's not likely to be you. You'll be emboiled in war and bitter rivalries while someone else by total luck happens to get along best with everyone and soars to the top. That's Civ 4's largest flaw, at least on reasonable difficulty levels. Each player is playing nearly perfectly, so even if you play perfectly you'll only win a tenth of the time.

There are other little annoying quirks that will consume much of your play time. Usually you'll control a large number of tiles and a large number of workers which have many projects to balance. You can manage their tasks manually if you want to spend a minute each turn scrolling around your empire memorizing the terrain and monitoring the individual needs of each city and national trends of surplus and deficit, but you probably just want to automate your workers and have them weigh the variables themselves. The problem is that they're idiotic. Workers tend to spend a dozen turns at a time building forts on top of valuable resources instead of constructing improvements to harvest them. If you don't have the requisite tech to gather the resource (you discover oil with Scientific Method but can't pump it until Combustion) then they ALWAYS build a fort on it.

They also like destroying your farms to build workshops and lumber yards, even if the city is starving and desperately needs more farms. The plus side is that city governors are actually pretty good about intelligently selecting tiles to work, even if your workers frustrate their plans.

Overall Civilization 4 is one of the greatest games ever published. It's a lot of fun and you'll continue to be engaged by the complex gameplay long after you've grown tired beating other single player games over and over. It's just sometimes frustrating.

Oh and you MUST get Beyond the Sword. Without the BtS expansion the AI blatantly cheats even on the easiest difficulties. The BtS expansion includes all of the gameplay changes of Warlords, so don't get them both. Improvements over vanilla Civ 4 include great generals, the espionage system, and a few new tech paths.

Customer Review: Booooring
Summary: 2 Stars

I've played all incarnations of the Civ game and I really have to say that they never change. They never improve. They never evolve. This game might have been fun 10 years ago, but now its just a boring, nonsensical waste of time and money. So disappointing. Civ 2 was a better, funner game by far.

Customer Review: A great game, but beware of a problem with the GOLD edition
Summary: 1 Stars

This is one of the greatest games of all time. But beware of a problem with the gold edition. Inside the box is a highly abridged manual that says on the cover 'complete manual on disc 3'. Well, no there isn't. I called the publishers support line and was told there were no manuals on the cd's and I should google it. The only thing I found was some pirate sites. Great. The publisher of this game is sending me to pirate sites for the documentation that should have come with the game. This is NOT a game you can understand and play without a thorough manual. Good luck with that.

Customer Review: Civ IV upgrade
Summary: 5 Stars

Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Gold Edition I've played a couple earlier versions of Civ IV and didn't really expect much with this, but I was pleasantly surprised at at the tweaks and balancing that has been done. Terrain is more realistic, minor random events (some of which give you minor options) have been brought back (I don't think I've seen random events since the first Civ), barbarians can now form formidable armies, the tech tree has been balanced and new items added. Not to mention new civs and units.